Sensor network distributed computation for Direct Position Determination

Classical localization systems based on TDOA/FDOA use a two-stage estimation approach. In the first stage, pairs of sensors share data to estimate TDOA/FDOA. Then, the extracted TDOA/FDOA measurements are used to estimate the emitter location. In some recently published methods, an optimal single-stage approach named Direct Position Determination (DPD) has been proposed to improve the position estimation accuracy. However, unlike the classical two-stage method where the TDOA/FDOA estimation can be distributed across all sensors, DPD processes all the received signals together at a single sensor node. However, when sensors have limited computational capabilities it is desirable to distribute the computation across all sensors. Furthermore, concentrating all the processing into a single node makes the location system less robust to the loss of sensors. In this paper, we develop a distributed localization method with the goal of reducing the computational load on each sensor and increasing the reliability of the system.